Critiques of Rosa Luxemburg

Russian Revolutionary, critical of Luxemburg on the need for a dictatorship of the party of the proletariat, wrote in debate on the question of self-determination: "In her quest for "practicality" Rosa Luxemburg has lost sight of the principal practical task both of the Great-Russian proletariat and of the proletariat of other nationalities: that of day-by-day agitation and propaganda against all state and national privileges, and for the right, the equal right of all nations, to their national state."

Hungarian, once the Commissar for Culture and Education in Hungary's short-lived Socialist experiment in 1919. Lukács provides a broad overview of Luxemburg's main theoretical contributions and organisational struggles, "Rosa Luxemburg perceived at a very early stage that the organisation is much more likely to be the effect than the cause of the revolutionary process, just as the proletariat can constitute itself as a class only in and through revolution."

Palestinian, critiqued the Soviet Union as a form of "bureaucratic state capitalism", wrote in praise of Luxemburg's insight: "Rosa Luxemburg’s conception of the structure of the revolutionary organisations – that they should be built, from below up, on a consistently democratic basis – fits the needs of the workers’ movement in the advanced countries much more closely than Lenin’s conception of 1902-04 which was copied and given an added bureaucratic twist by the Stalinists the world over."

Once a German Spartacist, and a young contemporary of Luxemburg, his critique 60 years after her death summarizes: "Despite some false notions, with respect to theory and some illusions regarding socialist practice, her revolutionary impulse yielded the essential elements required for a socialist revolution: an unwavering internationalism and the principle of the self-determination of the working class within its organizations and within society."